VFXArabia

Houdini Hologram (image based)

Remember the old Hologram tool : https://vimeo.com/364013475

Well I pushed it more so it now has a light source with some nice volumetric effect.

Spring Cleaning

Dear my beloved Patrons,

It's been an awesome experience over the past year, and it wasn't going to be without your support.

I used to have one major tire to share my tools in and thinking of the future and what I might offer it felt like a limitation, so doing some reconstruction to my tires felt like a good idea and this will not affect anyone, you'll still be able to access the t...

Houdini Deforming Flip

Well if you are looking for the technique behind Spider Man the water rise monster shot then you are in the right place.

I found two ways until now to create this effect, one of them "which I used in this setup" is by using the surfacepressure attribute to control the flip based on it's location in the animated model sdf volume, the other method is by using volumegradient vectors which wi...

Houdini Fish School

In short a simple fish system which includes:

- Avoiding each other.

- Avoiding obstacles.

- Controllable range at where the fish will start avoiding.

Any inputs will be appreciated.

Houdini mixing smoke colors with different densities

Update 25-11-2020: 

Since this is only a two dimensional sim I forgot to checked that option in the Smoke Object, so when you change the sim resolution you wont have to manually tweak the grid size depth to be one voxel, it will do it for you.

Also pay attention to the sourcing nodes "inside the dop network" when you change the resolution, it's animated to stop putting (density...

Houdini Vellum balloons

A simple setup to create balloons,

Tool's features:

- Different string length (yup I used strings not cloth for the wires)

- Balloons shader using Redshift.

- It has a prototype approach to cut the wires at a stretch threshold, still needs some refinement.

- It relies on scatter and 3d relaxation to make sure the balloons arent intersecting at creation frame. ...

Houdini Hologram (image based)

Continuing with the hologram series but this time I created a tool that uses a 2d sequence to create an appealing 3D (or let's say 2.5D) Hologram.

What's needed is:

-Alpha sequence for the cutout.

-Color Sequence.

Note: 

-The sequence I used belong to www.viz-people.com, so I had their permission to attach the video file with the setup.

-The 3...

Houdini Reflection Vector (vop)

As simple as the title suggests, you will need an origin point and a target one to drive the direction and the collision model, I developed this tool while working on flocking collision avoidance behavior where the velocity vector will act as the reflection direction.

Houdini Fixing (overlapping / intersecting) mesh for cloth sim

A tool I developed while working on MBC Ramadan TV spots, you can check them here: https://www.behance.net/gallery/81943867/MBC1-Ramadan-2019-TV-spots-(Fananees) 

I was tasked with cloth sim and some of the characters were curvy or with a large muscle mass...

Houdini Flag

A simple setup attaching a piece of cloth to a string using Vellum.

Houdini Black Hole (Redshift)

The problem with the previous mantra setup is that it was really slow to render, and now with the redshift version it's supper fast, it has the same features with additionally:

-The center of the dust circle moves faster than the outer ring (more logical).

-Volume (vdb) cloud in addition to the points in the circle.

-Star field (point cloud), to give some depth to...

Houdini Plexus

Tool's features:

- Two wire zones (text, environment)

- Wires and source count (global, text, environment)

- Drop based on length (you can set the long wires to drop more than the short ones or vise versa).

- Color.

- Wind (fake one 😉 ).

Houdini Hologram (animated object)

You asked for it and here it is, Built on top of the original Houdini hologram tool: https://vimeo.com/308812994

Now the tool support deforming models, tool's feature:

- Define resolution (sections / points in section).

- Track animation, based on model centroid.

- Auto slicing, it will detect model heig...

Houdini Black Hole (mantra)

Got motivated by the event last month "The supermassive black hole at the core of supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87", and OMG it was so ugly so I thought of recreating it Houdini 😉

In short it's all about bending light so lens refraction is where you should focus and after a couple of experiments and value tweaking I came up with this result.

Tool's feature:
- Event hori...

Houdini stick scatter points to a deforming model

A simple trick but crucial to stick scatter points to a deforming model.

Houdini Recursive Fracturing (Particle solver Stage 02)

As I promised stage 2 is here and I'm confident it contains everything you need to create an amazing Recursive Fracturing, well don't judge by my result I'm sure you can do better ;)

Tool's feature:

- Multi stage voronoi fracture system.

- Uses particle solver for speed sake so no collision between parts (might create it in a separate tool if you like).

- Activation is b...

Thinking Particle Bacteria Multiplying

Created using Cebas Thinking Particles inside 3ds max, it randomly divide bacteria and uses Bullet Solver for dynamics. 

You can control the timing and division percentage, but you need to dive down ;)

Note:

-Don't change the frame sampling, I put it to per half frame.

- For more accuracy you can increase the Bullet Solver iteration so bacteria wont overlap in case ...

Houdini Recursive Fracturing (Particle solver Stage 01)

It took me some time to wrap my head around this technique, it's getting pretty complex fast so I broke it into two stages, the first one will hold the core features and the second stage will fine tune things more and add some details and beauty features.

Tool's feature:

- multi stage voronoi fracture system.

- uses particle solver for speed sake so no collision between parts ...

Thinking Particles Morphing

A simple trick to morph between two objects using cebas thinking particles inside 3ds max.

Tool's feature:

- Uses volume break.

- Activation method (in mesh condition in my case) you can use what ever you want.

- Several forces: Path follow, wind noise and spinning.

Note: This tool doesn't have an interface so you need to have some knowledge in TP for y...

Houdini Rock Generator

Update 28-03-2019:

Houdini 17.5 introduced a new, fast and easy way to calculate curvature using the built in Measure sop, so I added a new version of this tool "Rock_Generator_04_H17.5"

Tool's feature:

- Creating deep and shallow cracks.

- Horizontal or vertical stripes of your choice.

- Color visualizing on point color, it will save some time and will give b...

Thinking Particles Crumbling wall

Mimicking wall shell crumbling using in between particles bind relations and the famous Cebas Shape Collision dynamics engine. You can get away using Bullet physics which will give you a more responsive and fast simulation setup but at a cost of accuracy. 

Created using 3ds max 2017.

Houdini object occlusion and camera culling

Although you can create this tool using a simple attribute vop and a ray sop but out of practice I used a wrangle to achieve the same result, also it looks more neat only one node.

This code has two parts:

Occlusion (Hidden Point Removal):

Every point shoots a ray at the camera and checks if it collided with any object using the intersect() command, if there was a hit the poin...

Houdini Hologram

A simple tool that will transform your model into a hologram.

The tool's feature:

- Define resolution (sections / points in section).

- Solid color or texture based.

- Total control of noise pattern.

- Camera occlusion.

- Two lights with shadow.

- Redshift setup was used.

Dont know what else I might add in the future, please if you have any ideas ...

Happy Holidays

What a fantastic year 2018 was, and it wouldn't have been without your support guys, I really appropriate it.
Looking forward for another great year, and I'm all hopes that 2019 will hold more progress, health and happiness to all of us.

Your friend
Alaa.

Houdini Quick tip #10 (Attribute copy by id)

I got a task where I had to pick certain parts of a flip and assign a different color (or any other attribute), the normal way to do so is to:

- Freeze the desired frame.

- Select your points and assign an attribute.

- Attribute copy.

Normally this will work but some times your flip sim point count change due to some deletion or if you have an emitter, and since Attribute copy ...

Houdini Quick tip #09 (Volume slice)

A lot of times viewport volume representation is not enough or at least wont show you what's inside, so quick way to MRI scan your volume is to use "volumeslice" sop.

Houdini Cloud Lighting Baker (Redshift version)

Updated version v4... 

Build on top of the original light baker here... 

Change log:

- Well it's build to work with Redshift, the delay was due to the lack of colored volume grid support but as of v...

Houdini image sequence loop, offset and hold

Hey everyone, I hope you find this article useful. It was my first time to face such thing looping and shifting file sequences and the naive me thought there must be a parameter for this where I can just dial some numbers lol.
Well this is Houdini and have to suffer, I searched the forums and tried all the formulas and came up with some conclusions and experience that I wanted to share with you...

Houdini Quick tip #08 (RedShift SOP level packed primitives instancing support)

Sorry a long title but worth noting that as of version 2.6.27 redshift will support the sop level instancing feature that mantra support by default.

Prior to this you needed to use the Instance node in object level along way around, or else using the copy sop to instance will take ages to cook before each frame in the animation.
for example in the picture I copied 100,000 chamfered boxes that...

Houdini Quick tip #07 (Break each edge into a separate primitive)

I dont know if it is the right title (#explode edges, #detach edges), some times I miss 3ds max when it comes to such tasks, but here you go a simple way to do it in Houdini.
Well all you need to do is add a carve node and the rest is as shown in the picture.

I must add sth, my friend  Muhamma...